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Like everything else the cheers had been manufactured
I had written that the nasty guy had tweeted that illegal workers at farms and hotels should not be picked up because they are necessary for these businesses. I noted that the White House said the policy of raiding those places had not changed.
Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos reported that Homeland Security tried to clarify by sending Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin to Newsmax. Yes, raids on worksites are sill a cornerstone of ICE operations. There was no exemption for farms and hotels. McLaughlin lied when she said ICE was only going after “the worst of the worst.”
I recently wrote that Sen. Alex Padilla was forced to the ground and handcuffed when asking HS Secretary Noem a question. Now there is a second political arrest.
Lisa Needham of Kos said ICE arrested Brad Lander, a Democratic candidate for NYC mayor. The reason appears to be because he was accompanying someone they wanted to nab and he tried to prevent it. One problem: ICE isn’t allowed to arrest citizens.
McLaughlin announced the charges as impeding a federal officer. That nicely confuses FBI agents who can arrest citizens with ICE agents, who can’t. They way she said it made it sound like the real victims were ICE agents, not the immigrants.
Needham talked about the old practice of company towns. When a company set up operations in a remote area workers had to live in company housing and shop in company stores. They were paid in company scrip, which couldn’t be spent elsewhere. Pay and prices were such that the workers fell deeper into debt, and thus were stuck.
Bringing that up to date, the possibility of creating new crypto currencies allows Walmart and Amazon to consider issuing their own. At least they are thinking about stablecoins, meaning their value is pegged to the dollar. But a person paid in Walmart coin would be restricted to spending it at Walmart, even if prices were better elsewhere.
There is a reason, outside of tying people to their store, for issuing their own currency – they can sidestep the significant costs of payment processing and banking fees. But it leaves consumers juggling currencies.
A different president might protect consumers. But the nasty guy made $57 billion from crypto last year and the Securities and Exchange commission dropped a crypto case after the company cozied up to a nasty guy company.
Needham reported that companies that cozy up to the nasty guy are getting a good payback. Sure, that cozying can cost millions, but the payback is much higher.
Needham gave a couple examples. I’ll mention one. GEO is a company with government contracts to run ICE detention centers. The EPA had a complaint against GEO last year for failing to provide protective gear from chemicals that can cause skin burns and eye damage. The NLRB filed a complaint for using detainees as workers and not paying them proper wages. Large fines were pending.
Then the company gave the maximum to the nasty guy’s campaign, $1 million to his PAC, and smaller amounts to other Republicans.
The NLRB no longer has a quorum and can’t hear cases. And the EPA withdrew its complaint.
That’s called corruption.
Alex Samuels of Kos wrote about the other side of the issue: “Sen. Bernie Sanders is urging Democratic leaders to stop cozying up to their own wealthy donors.” Sanders and seven other Democratic senators wrote a letter to the leaders asking them to ban super PACs and “dark money” in Democratic primaries. If Democrats are to fight the influence of rich people, something Sanders has been talking a lot about lately, they need to start with themselves.
The letter noted that these super PACS spend in Democratic primaries, then spend to defeat Democrats in the general election.
Overturning Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruling that opened unlimited outside spending, is a long-term project. But citizens already notice (thanks to Musk) that rich people have too much influence. That give Democrats an opening.
In 2022 the 988 suicide crisis hotline began working. One could contact that number in a variety of ways. A person is first asked a bit about who they are. One of the options is LGBTQ. If that is chosen they are passed on to the Trevor Project, counselors trained to handle queer people. This separate service is needed because of the high suicide rate of queer youth.
Oliver Willis of Kos reported that initial menu option disappears on July 17. The reason is the nasty guy is being nasty and said so. Yeah, this is part of his and Republican attacks on LGBTQ people and trans people in particular. Suicide rates will go up.
Young LGBTQ+ people are under attack by their state and federal governments. And now, if they are driven into darkness, Trump has cut off a vital and lifesaving resource that the community increasingly depends on.
Thankfully, the Trevor Project remains. All that is being lost is the vital connection to the 988 hotline, which is much easier to remember than the name and full number of the Trevor Project. That’s still losing a lot.
If you are in crisis, contact 988. If you are queer you can still contact 988 for now or find the Trevor Project number.
The nasty guy created a Religious Liberty Commission. Alix Breeden of Kos reported they met for the first time this week. Thankfully, it seems all they did was gripe about “anti-Christian bias,” how Christians are “under attack,” that religious liberty is threatened, and that the society has no moral code.
Yes, we as a nation do have a moral code. It’s quite a good one, though far from perfect. It just isn’t completely Christian.
Though this is a “Religious” commission one can easily guess how much representation there was from Muslim, Jewish, or even liberal Christian groups.
The group’s next meeting is scheduled for September. We can hope they’ll gripe some more and not actually do anything.
In last Friday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin had a couple good quotes. This was before the No Kings protest and the dreary parade for the nasty guy. Just before then the nasty guy went to the re-re-named Fort Bragg and used cheering soldiers as a backdrop for a rally style speech. Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer added a bit of background.
The insurrectionist Bragg surely would have been heartened when Trump used his powerful platform to rally an entire army against democratically elected public officials like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass — and when the uniformed troops of a once-proudly-apolitical U.S. Army answered with thunderous applause.
Like everything else about Trump’s strongman regime, the cheers had been manufactured. Military.com later reported that the chiseled forces of the storied 82nd Airborne Division behind Trump’s podium had been picked in part for their right-wing political views and also — according to one email obtained by the news site — to satisfy our allegedly 224-pound (lol) president with “no fat soldiers.” (Yes, Donald Trump’s Tinder ad for his dream-date U.S. soldier essentially read, “No fatties.”)
Tom Nichols of The Atlantic noted the generals did not speak up and added:
He mocked former President Joe Biden and attacked various other political rivals. He elicited cheers from the crowd by announcing that he would rename U.S. bases (or re-rename them) after Confederate traitors. He repeated his hallucinatory narrative about the invasion of America by foreign criminals and lunatics. He referred to 2024 as the “election of a president who loves you,” to a scatter of cheers and applause. And then he attacked the governor of California and the mayor of Los Angeles, again presiding over jeers at elected officials of the United States.
He led soldiers, in other words, in a display of unseemly behavior that ran contrary to everything the founder of the U.S. Army, George Washington, strove to imbue in the American armed forces.
In the comments exlrrp posted a meme playing on one of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claims that Democrats could control the weather. This meme shows a woman with a bright smile ready to push the button on the Democrat Party Weather Machine on the day of the parade. It did rain that day in Washington, though a White House spokesperson claimed that it hadn’t.
In today’s pundit roundup Dworkin had more good quotes. From Ron Fournier of Convulsions:
During a contentious Senate Armed Service Committee meeting Wednesday, [Elissa Slotkin,] freshman Democrat, grilled [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth over whether he had authorized members of the military to "detain and arrest protesters" in Los Angeles. He ducked and deflected. She erupted.
"What is the order?" Slotkin demanded. "Be a man, list it out. Did you authorize them to detain or arrest? That is a fundamental of democracy. I'm not trying to be a snot here. I'm just trying to get the actual — did you authorize them to do that?"
Be a man, she said. But Hegseth didn’t have it in him.
Dworkin wrote about the nasty guy saying he’ll decide in two weeks if the US should help Israel against Iran:
Reports are that Pete Hegseth and [director of intelligence] Tulsi Gabbard are ignored when it comes to input on what Trump is supposed to do. No surprise; they, like DHS Sec Noem are only there to cosplay. And as for Bibi Netanyahu, Trump knows any advice he gets is to benefit Netanyahu, not Trump.
When it comes to Iran, Trump is stuck with making a decision. The buck stops with him. And he’s afraid to decide.
My best guess is that Trump will do the right thing (not bomb Iran) for the wrong reason (he’s a coward and is afraid of his base turning on him). But who knows? Trump’s a damaged human being and is hard to predict when it comes to doing something difficult.
Thomas Edsall of the New York Times worked with Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the Berkeley law school, to list five grounds on which to impeach the nasty guy. Dworkin quoted two.
Trump has repeatedly ignored due process of law, such as in sending people to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador and to the South Sudan without a semblance of due process. The cutoff of funds to universities and to grant recipients has been done without any due process. This is a very serious abuse of power.
President Trump has used his power for retribution. His actions against law firms, which have been done without due process, have been expressly stated to be for personal retribution because they employed lawyers who investigated or prosecuted him. This is a very serious abuse of power.
Dworkin reminds us we need “a Democratic House to impeach him (and a heavily Democratic Senate to convict).”
Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quoted late night commentary. A sample:
“I am genuinely baffled. Why is it when a foreigner—or someone that shouldn’t be here—kills one of us, we’re going to put 150-billion dollars into border security, we’re going to militarize our cities, we’re going to spend trillions of dollars to bomb and destabilize foreign countries overseas, we're going to ban people from random countries from ever f---ing visiting here, [and] we’re going to take our shoes off at the airport forever? But when we do it to ourselves? Nothing. It makes no sense—it's jarring cognitive dissonance.”
—Jon Stewart, on the MAGA cult’s obsession with beefing up law enforcement and the military in response to barely-existent shootings by immigrants, while doing nothing to reduce the epidemic of shootings—like the assassination of Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark—by home-grown Americans.
A tweet from the Daily Show has the caption, “Iran: Weeks away from having nuclear weapons since 1995.”
And something I heard in the news: As part of the Israel-Iran war Iran hit an Israeli hospital. Israel’s defense chief declared that to be a war crime. I thought that statement took chutzpah to cover the hypocrisy, considering what Israel has been doing in Gaza. Bill quoted an NBC News report:
“Nearly all hospitals in Gaza are now damaged or destroyed, and half of them are no longer operational,” Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, told NBC News. During the war, Gaza’s hospitals have eked back services, only to be repeatedly struck or besieged again.
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